The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Two responsibilities of operators of telecommunications networks are ensuring optimal usage of network resources and meeting performance expectations of network users. Network operators ensure optimal usage of their network resources and meet performance expectations of network users by deploying traffic engineered paths in their network. Typically, network operators have two choices when deploying traffic engineered paths. One choice is to deploy traffic engineered paths between edge routers of the network. Another choice is to deploy traffic engineered paths between core routers of the network.
Deploying traffic engineered paths between edge routers allows the network operator to control the network traffic that will be routed to particular traffic engineered paths, but such deployment typically results in a high number of traffic engineered paths and the network operator quickly confronts scalability issues. On the other hand, opting to deploy traffic engineered paths between core routers results in smaller number of traffic engineered paths and allows the network operator to satisfactorily handle scalability issues. However, deploying traffic engineered paths between core routers does not provide the network operator with any control in routing certain network traffic to particular paths. Therefore, a network operator must always choose between greater control over routing certain traffic to particular traffic engineered paths and avoiding scalability issues by deploying smaller number of traffic engineered paths.